What you need to know:

• Renee Howie has left AMP after a three-year stint as CMO and joined Insignia Financial as its chief customer officer.
• It was a mixed decision to leave, the experienced marketer says – but the combination of P&L, group executive stature and future-focused business agenda were too tempting not to “have a crack at”, she says.
• During her tenure at AMP, Howie oversaw the transformation of both the art and science of marketing, including the rollout of a CDP and new martech stack, rebrand of its North Investment business and then the group AMP brand, and renewed emphasis on direct-to-consumer through its banking and superannuation offerings.
• The results included near double-digit lift in group brand perceptions plus the rise of consideration into the double digits from lows of 2-3 per cent when she joined.
• The job at Insignia will see Howie looking at how to best position eight brands in market – including the acquired MLC and ANZ OnePath businesses – covering a breadth of customers, from advisers to institutions and consumers.

Three years ago Renee Howie became CMO at beleaguered financial services giant, AMP. Her choice of new job raised more than a few eyebrows. She’s loved every minute of it.

It was an eyes wide open decision to help an iconic, 170-year-old Australian brand regain respect in the community and with consumers. AMP had been through a punishing five years, tarnished by a damning Royal Commission report into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services space, the fallout from a fees-for-no-service scandal, and revelations it had charged dead customers and sold unnecessary products.

As Howie told this journalist in her first 90 days, the job was to rebuild respect for AMP in the Australian community. As she exits the business, she proudly touts a near double-digit uplift in group brand perceptions over the last 18 months, with RepTrack scores showing a 3.0 point reputation score lift from Q1, 2022 to Q3, 2024.

“AMP was one of the greatest roles of my career,” Howie says, attributing progress to strong leadership support and autonomy for the marketing team to lean into brand issues.

“When I think back on the three years and what my team achieved, it was huge. The brand uplift has been material, there was a new brand platform launched. We took super direct-to-consumer for the first time in a long time, we rebranded the North Investment platform, one of the keystone businesses. We implemented a marketing tech stack all the way through where previously there had been no stack. The volume of work across the five business units my team was able to pump out at a really high quality was significant. I’m so terribly proud of them. On the flip side, I’m very grateful AMP really backed and continues to back marketing and its role in the organisation.”

So why leave and join Insignia?

“As I articulate it, I didn’t leave AMP, I joined Insignia,” Howie responds. “Group executive roles where marketing can have a seat at the table and be at the beginning of the journey with an organisation are very rare. Sometimes, opportunities don’t have the best timing. That’s the honest truth, it wasn’t that I was looking for my next opportunity. There was an opportunity that doesn’t come around very often.

“I’m also working with a leader I worked for before and trusted – that was a unique combination for me and I had to have a crack at.”

The Insignia brief

Insignia Financial, which once carried the IOOF group name and has roots going back to 1846, changed its name in 2021. Thanks to a raft of acquisitions including MLC, one of Australia’s oldest and well-known wealth and superannuation businesses, plus ANZ OnePath, it now has eight brands in the portfolio covering financial advice, superannuation and investing. In all, $311 billion in group funds is under management and administration, and it’s servicing about 2 million members and clients. Insignia listed on the ASX in 2003. Over the past year net revenue was up 1 per cent year-on-year to $1.39bn.

Howie officially took up the chief customer officer reins on Friday 1 November. The group executive role reports to CEO, Scott Hartley, who stepped into the top job in March. Her role covers all traditional marketing functions through to digital, data, analytics, marketing, brand, customer analytics, government relations, media, public relations. What’s also really exciting for Howie is she’s picking up the Advice businesses, gaining a P&L. Insignia has two advice businesses, Shadforth and Bridges, which Howie will also be looking after.

It’s a newly created role of sorts. Marketing was centralised historically, but upon joining in March, Hartley made several tweaks to the operating structure in July, resulting in the customer role being created.

Insignia now operates four dedicated lines of business: Asset management, superannuation, Wrap Platform and Advice. Each is led by an executive with end-to-end accountability including Howie. Other new executives to join the leadership team are Liz McCarthy, CEO of MLC Expand; Jason Sommer, chief operating officer leading strategy and enterprise services functions; Dave Woodall, CEO, superannuation; and a chief technology officer, which is held in the interim by Frank Lombardo while a permanent leader is found. Six other existing executives sit on the Insignia Financial leadership team covering finance, MLC Asset Management, people, risk, legal and company secretary.

Howie points to the amalgamation of eight brands under one roof, servicing a range of blended channels – advisors, institutions, employers and consumers – as of key interest professionally.

“Working with the executive committee and board around how we want to take the business forward and show up in each channel is a really interesting challenge and something I really wanted to do,” she says. “The brand plan will be aligned to the business strategy… It’s about what is the right strategy for Insignia for the next five years, then how do we need to show up from a brand perspective across our channels to support that.”

Unlike AMP, the task coming into Insignia is “all about growth and future-focused”, Howie continues. “The business is keen to reinvigorate its direct channel, particularly under the MLC brand, which it historically has not had as much focus on. That’s a great opportunity to look at new technology in the market and leverage that.

“Now the business has simplified and absorbed all those acquisitions, it’s all about the new path forward.”

Such a growth mandate makes it an exciting place to be as a marketer, says Howie. “I honestly believe as marketers, we can be the growth engine for organisations. Whether it’s partnering with relationship managed distribution teams, or growing D2C, we have the capability both within tech and talent to be the growth engine for organisations,” she comments.

“Growth isn’t just what’s coming through the front door. It’s experience, understanding, behaviours – all the things a modern marketing function has access to and can deliver on. That is what drives holistic growth.

“It’ll be a really interesting task to work through.”

Tackling tech and brand at AMP

Howie has plenty of learnings from her tenure at AMP to tap into, especially on the tech front. One big job was implementing a marketing tech stack (Adobe) all the way through the business. The first step was standing up a customer data platform (CDP), matching online and offline data. Over a period of four months, it rolled out CDP, Customer Journey Analytics and Adobe Journey Optimizer (end-to-end Adobe Experience Platform).

“We had the data team sitting in the marketing function, which was extremely helpful. Our ability to stand up a deep and functional CDP early on was really important,” she explains. “We then rolled out use cases in batches where we could see our time to value. Instead of doing everything at once, we did it in increments and remained extremely focused.”

Where AMP saw most value initially was in journey and retention-led uses cases in its superannuation book, including pinpointing lifecycle moments, plus across its bank book. Although deliberately focused on getting new customers into the 25-year-old bank in the beginning, 14 interest rate rises over the last three years meant AMP became less focused on acquisition, not dissimilar to the other banks.

It’s just one example of the adapting and agility Howie says marketing teams everywhere have needed to exhibit in the changing economic conditions.

“The important thing there is marketing being really embedded in the business, which AMP teams are. They have great relationships with the business unit leaders, so they’re at the table having conversations around strategic pivots when they need to happen,” she says. “We definitely strengthened that during my time there.

“That’s a two-sided coin: One side is leaders in the organisation who see the value of marketing; then high-performing individuals who understand the businesses they are servicing and can respond and adapt as required against business outcomes.”

It took four months to implement the martech stack and become operational – a record in Australia, according to Howie. AMP had previously been using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to run its website, and also had Adobe Analytics.

The ‘art’ of marketing and brand was just as important, however, to turning the AMP ship around. In February last year, AMP debuted a new national brand campaign aimed at changing perceptions of being ‘wealthy’ under the moniker, ‘Whatever wealthy you want’. It was built on the back of what had been a successful ‘For the investor in all of us’ campaign and a persistent purpose of helping people create their tomorrow.

The result 18 months later is brand uplift is “material”, Howie says, while corporate reputation firm, RepTrack score lifted 3 points from Q1 22 to Q3 24. In addition, blended consideration hit the double-digit percentages, which was the marketing team’s target, from lows of 2-3 per cent when Howie joined. Brand awareness following AMP’s ‘Whatever Wealthy You Want’ campaign increased to as high as 74 per cent in May 2023, an 8 per cent uplift from the benchmark.

The rebranded North business meanwhile, reported 10 per cent growth in accounts under management in the first half of the financial year to $72.9 billion. AMP’s retail superannuation is also up 5.7 per cent to $30.8 billion – although net profits across various AMP groups remain down in the first half of its financial year.

“The volume of what we achieved in my time was the upside for me – that volume of transformation in three years and our output. I think to myself goodness, we did so much in that business in that timeframe,” she comments.

AMP has undertaken a global search for a new chief marketing officer and confirmed it expects to make an announcement on the new appointment soon, with commencement from 2025.